Architecture and the Environment

The ideas brought up in David Orr's article "Architecture and Education" were really exciting for me.  It seems like our personal ideals, like protecting the environment don't always get translated into action.  Managing what we value is difficult because there are so many factors affecting what we actually decide to act on.

His decision to build a school was pretty huge.  He wanted the students that were all helping to have a feeling of locality, knowing where they are and how that affects them.  The building wasn't going to be generic or boring, because that would take away from the educational goals in mind.  Some of the goals were to make students aware of how the natural environment works and how they affect it.  The building was made taking into account many of the negative consequences of using certain materials or methods.  The designers tried to build it in a way that wouldn't directly of indirectly cause harm to other people or the global natural environment.  Orr admits that this is an extremely difficult task, since the true cost of a material or method isn't always known.  Most of us don't even know exactly what the working conditions are for the people who make the clothes we wear.  It's an impressive task to design a building with these large-scale issues in mind.

There are some really cool things happening now for sustainable architecture.  Now there is LEED, a "internationally recognized green building certification system"(http://www.usgbc.org/) that measures many different ways a building affects human and environmental health.  It was started by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and is really successful, especially with large corporations who want to show (or convince) their consumers that they care about the environment.

LEED has also been successful in schools, following the same types of methods that Orr and his team did.  For example, my high school is LEED certified, but I'm not sure at which level.  Here is my school's website if you want to know more about the design process:
http://district196.org/ses/